HOME PAGE CRYPTO BITCOIN BIP 91 REACHES 80 % – WHAT THIS MEANS FOR BITCOIN
It’s not easy for Bitcoin enthusiasts over the last few days – many BIPs are flying around our ears, and now at the top of the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, something seems to have changed. GDP 91 now reached 80%. What does that actually mean?

The scaling debate is the trend topic in the Bitcoin news

Many prefer to keep their feet still and wait, others are insecure and another part can no longer hear the Bitcoin news. But we are coming to an end – whether with rising or falling prices. Read more about SegWit, SegWit2x and UASF here on onlinebetrug.de.

So that not everyone programs past each other and so that everyone knows what it is about, there are the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, short BIPs. These are texts on GitHub that introduce a certain new code or describe how to deal with a problem in the future. To each BIP belongs a so-called signal, for example bit 1 at BIP 148. Imagine this signal as a “0”, which is now switched to “1”. If you now dig a block, it contains the number 1 at the first position. All others would look at the block and would find the following series of numbers in the block: 1000. So everyone knows through the GDP 148 “Aha! There is one at the first position, so the Miner wants to support GDP 148!”. If you want to support GDP 91, you would signal this at the fourth position.

The dilemma

On 15.11.2016 a GDP with the title “Segregated Witness” started its election campaign in the Bitcoin network. Segregated Witness appeared in GDP 141 and should get a chance to be activated by 15.11.2017. But little happened among the miners – hardly anyone signaled for GDP 141. The author Shaolin Fry changed this with a new GDP that bore a somewhat more drastic title: “Mandatory activation of SegWit Deployment”.

This “mandatory activation of SegWit deployment” appeared in GDP 148. Thus GDP 148 is to be understood as a kind of plan to activate GDP 141.

But even then, not much changed – in May, Miner and Bitcoin’s greats got together in New York and reached a consensus. Since then SegWit2x has been mentioned. SegWit2x consists of two steps: the use of SegWit and then a hard fork a few months later to increase the block size.

But to activate SegWit you need 95% of the hash power in the network. A huge number. And that’s not all: Even if 95% of the miners vote for it, it doesn’t mean that 95% will go along with it. To rule out possible problems, James Hilliard came up with the idea of BIP 91 with the title “Reduced Threshold SegWit MASF”.

The cold shoulder
Hilliards GDP 91 could also be described as the “cold shoulder”. The GDP 91 is signalled on bit 4 and suddenly reached about 80% support in the last blocks. All GDPs have an activation period in which their status is “logged in”.

If, for example, 95 % is reached, an activation period must be waited for afterwards. So far this has been 2016 blocks, or two weeks. GDP 91 is somewhat faster in that sense: you only need 80% support and that only has to prevail for 336 blocks, or 2 days and 8 hours.

After that the GDP is enforced. Why do the miners suddenly jump over to GDP 91? Hilliard knew that it was difficult to get the required percentages, so he proposed the following: Signaling GDP 91 does not accept blocks of non-Segwit supporters. So you kick out the non-supporters. Or else, if several miners only opt for GDP 91, the other miners would miss something – namely valuable blocks.

And we see exactly this reaction on sites like XBT or Coindance. They jump over to GDP 91 in order not to miss anything. In the night from Thursday to Friday at 1 o’clock (currently 202 blocks) everything could already be over and with luck the scaling debate is over for the time being.

The innovation laboratory VISA Europe Collab has teamed up with SatoshiPay to make micropayments usable beyond Bitcoin users.

To put it in a nutshell: Berlin booms Bitcoin- and Blockchainwise. So much, both in terms of small startups and huge companies, is currently boiling at Bitcoin and Blockchain – and a lot of it is happening in Berlin!

One of the things that we presented on BTC-Echo is Satoshipay. This startup, which is on the road both in London and in Berlin, is now working together with the innovation laboratory VISA Europe Collab. This cooperation and the interest of the bank giant VISA was told at a press presentation in the Digital Hub field, a hub that was opened as part of a cooperation between VISA and Roland Berger.

VISA Europe Collab – a space for cryptosoft ideas

Some of the big cryptosoft companies are currently working on expanding their structures, which are certainly tried and tested but sometimes too rigid, to include the lean spirit of the start-up scene or at least to open a door to it: Is Cryptosoft a Scam? Beware, Read our Review First This leads to innovation laboratories of big companies like the RWE Innovation Hub, the VW Digital Lab or the SAP Innovation center.

The Visa Europe Collab is a corresponding structure that actively seeks partnerships with young, innovative companies. The aim is to provide opportunities for a lean startup culture (fail fast, cheap & early, late ROI calculation) within the giant Visa.

The Visa Europe Collab was presented by Michael Hoffmann. A total of six main topics can be seen: Identity and authentication, new markets and alternative financial solutions (which can also include Bitcoin), Me2B (i.e. the right to control one’s own data), smart cities, emerging retail journeys (i.e. the new development of the customer experience) and the blockchain. The latter is the most intensively studied technology of these six major topics, demonstrating how important VISA is the blockchain.

VISA’s Interest in the Blockchain

What the blockchain could mean for VISA was explained in more detail by Hendrik Kleinsmiede, a sympathetic British man who had made a mistake about the Brexit.

Although VISA is well positioned in terms of transactions between two people and also between man and machine, they notice that they are limited in terms of some particular types of transactions: Macropayments, where millions to billions of euros are involved, smart contracts and microtransactions are the fields that aroused VISA’s interest in the blockchain.

The latter are particularly interesting, since a guiding idea in the context of the Internet of things is inter-machine communication and contract processing (or in English machine to machine communication, or m2m communication for short). If a small lamp wants to buy electricity from the smart grid, it may pay less than one cent per second.

These microtransactions are ultimately the core of the event and the reason for the partnership between VISA Europe Collab and Satoshi Pay, as instantaneous, smallest transactions are exactly what the latter company is all about.

SatoshiPay – microtransactions instead of paywalls
Meinhard Benn, founder of SatoshiPay, presented his company, the latest developments and plans for the future. SatoshiPay has also been the subject of an article on BTC-Echo. For those of you who are financially a bit clammy, I would like to briefly summarize the sense behind SatoshiPay:

The basic motivation is ultimately the question of how content providers can earn money on the net. For some providers, Adblocker has become a real sales problem: every year more people are using Adblocker.

Newspaper websites therefore often think about paywalls – but they bring with them two problems: on the one hand – and here I quote Meinhard literally – “100% of paywalls are difficult to use”.

Above all, however, they usually work with lump sums: Magazines like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or Financial Times want between ten and thirty euros a month for a flat rate on their pages. A flat rate is good on the one hand – but how many articles per magazine do you actually read? Wouldn’t it be better if you could pay for the individual articles?

Here, however, there is the problem that individual articles would then come to amounts in the range of a few cents. Transfers over a few cents are rather unprofitable both in the classical world of the Fiat currencies and in the Bitcoin world, finally there are fees. Moreover

Binance, the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange by market capitalization, is planning measures against money laundering with crypto currencies. By integrating the Chainalysis KYT software, the exchange is expanding its compliance with classic financial market regulations.

Binance and Chainalysis fight against Bitcoin formula

As Chainalysis announced yesterday, Thursday, 18 October, the company is now working with the Binance crypto exchange. Binance uses the Chainalysis software KYT (“Know Your Transaction”) to establish compliance in the area of money laundering. According to the company, KYT is Bitcoin formula software specially developed for the transfer of money laundering activities. Chainalysis on Medium describes how it works as follows:

Chainalysis KYT is based on a set of proprietary algorithms that use a number of open source resources to identify and report suspicious patterns in the transaction behavior of monitored wallets.

Since this year, the tool has also included the monitoring of BCH in addition to the analysis of BTC.

Binance’s expansion efforts in Africa

We have already reported in detail on Binance’s expansion efforts in Africa. The cooperation with Chainalysis must therefore be seen in the light of the exchange’s growth intentions. These are accompanied by strict regulations, which the exchange must comply with. Binance CFO Wei Zhou adds:

“By working with Chainalysis, we can build a compliance program that will enable the next phase of our growth. Our vision is to provide the infrastructure for a blockchain ecosystem and promote the freedom of money worldwide, while complying with the legal requirements in the countries where we operate”.

It is precisely these legal requirements that may have led Binance to partner with Chainalysis. The tool helps the Exchanges to comply with the legal know-your-customer and anti-money laundering regulations. Through this kind of compliance, stock exchanges could ultimately get hold of their much longed-for bank licenses.

The Japanese technology company Sony wants to expand its digital rights management system with the Blockchain technology. In this way, information on rights to written works is to be managed.

Sony has already come out several times as a Blockchain fan. The company already worked together with IBM on a blockchain-based education platform in the summer of last year. In April of this year, Sony even filed a patent concerning the use of blockchain technology for the administration of user rights. Now the company wants to use the security advantages of the technology to permanently manage the rights to written works.

Numerous blockchain options

The project is being developed jointly by Sony Music Entertainment Japan and Sony Global Education, as the company announced on 15 October from its website. There, Sony also explains why blockchain technology is currently the focus of the company’s development:

“Blockchains create networks in which programs and information are difficult to destroy or falsify and are well suited for the free transfer of data and rights. These characteristics give Blockchains many possible uses for a range of services, including finance, goods distribution management and sharing economy, and we expect that Blockchains will provide even more innovative services in the future”.

Sony even filed a patent concerning the use of blockchain technology

The new system will be based on an existing system for authentication, sharing and rights management of training data. However, it will also offer functions for processing rights information. Sony explained that:

“This newly developed system specialises in managing rights-related information from written works, with functions to demonstrate the date and time at which the electronic data was created, and using the properties of blockchains to record verifiable information in a manner that is difficult to forge and to identify pre-recorded work. This allows participants to share and verify when and by whom electronic data was created.”

These managed works can be electronic textbooks, music, films, VR content and books. This is intended to put a stop to legal disputes about who is the actual author of the work.